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Ask Slashdot: How To Share a SharePoint Site?
New submitter grzzld writes "I am a systems analyst for a County in New York. Last year I made a SharePoint site that manages grants and it was well received. So much so that it won a NACo award. Since then, there have been several requests from other municipalities from around the country who would like to get this SharePoint site. The county is trying to figure out how to protect ourselves from people making money from it and having people hold us liable if it they use it and something goes awry. I am afraid that ultimately nothing will be done and the site will not be shared since at the end of the day it is much easier to not do anything and just say no. I proposed that we license it under an Open Source agreement but I am not versed enough in the differences between all of them. It is also unclear to me if I could do this since the nature of the 'program' is a SharePoint site. It seemed like CodePlex would be a good place to put this since it is Microsoft centric and it an open source initiative. I just want to contribute my work to others who may find it useful. The county just wants to make sure they can't be held liable and have somebody turn my work around and make a buck. How can I release this to the world and make sure the county's concerns are addressed?"
The GPL variants and the BSD licenses all contain a disclaimer of warranty (the part that reads "THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ``AS IS'' AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE" or similar), which addresses the county's concerns. By releasing code under a license with such a disclaimer, you are asserting that no one can sue you if the code breaks, even if your code breaking caused them some kind of loss.
Dance like nobody's watching. Sing like you're in the shower. Fuck like you're being filmed.
Online Grants Management System
Suffolk County, New York
Population: 1,493,350 (2010)
Program Year: 2011
Abstract:
In Suffolk County, NY, the development of grant applications as well as the coordination of successfully funded grants across was determined to be an inefficient system.. Individual staff and programmatic units each kept their own separate monitoring and tracking systems that recorded different levels and phases of grants. In some instances, there were gaps in the collection of information. An interdisciplinary group convened to discuss the problem and to plan for improvements. The planning group brainstormed and used additional quality improvement strategies in order to develop the Grants management System (GMS). GMS has developed as a centralized tracking and coordination system that tracks grants through very phase: the evaluation of whether to apply for a Request for proposal (RFP), application submission, grant award, acceptance of the award by the county, development and finalization of contracts, inventory management, monitoring of expenditures, claiming, revenue receipting, grants reporting, grants purchases, etc. Feedback from SCDHS staff indicated a high level of satisfaction with GMS, improved knowledge and skills, improved management and implementation of grants. Due to the improved efficiencies of GMS, the SCDHS was able to reduce the grants staff by 2 Full Time Equivalents (FTE), with significant cost savings.
What is it with this fear that someone will make a buck? It does not diminish the value of the original work, rather it ads to it. The county should focus on what their job is and if somebody actually manages to create something valuable from that - great!
The site schema? Custom web-parts? Masterpages? Data? Everything?
You could create a site definition that contained as much or as little or as much as your site as you wanted; wrap it up in a Visual Studio solution/WSP and then people could deploy an instance of your site with all of the above pre-previsioned. At that point it's just a SharePoint extension so would be no different to open-sourcing an Office extension. Even better, site templates are largely just XML files so it's even less "complicated" than custom-code - it's all just parsed by the core product.
throw new NoSignatureException();
FYI, if I remember right all works by a public employee while employed are to be in the public domain. This is at least true for federal workers.
Why do you care if others make money off it? It's government developed so that means it was funded by taxpayer money.
All taxpayers should have access to it, even if they want to make money from it. It should automatically be public domain.
You can still CYA by a simple BSD style license.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
I loath Microsoft and closed-source software, and "walk the walk" (I use a total of 4 proprietary programs), but this comment is beyond worthless. The poster says that the site works great, and wants to share it with other groups. You are basically saying "no it doesn't." And there is no analysis as to why that might be the case. You might as well have just screamed nonsenically in anger.
Why does the county care if somebody else makes money on it? That's just vindictive. As long as there's nothing blocking somebody from developing useful things for free, I see no reason to forbid business uses.
If the county wants to share but is concerned about liability, THEY SHOULD TALK TO THEIR ON-STAFF/ IN-HOUSE/ ON-RETAINER legal counsel!
They have them, I guarantee it. Use them. The last they want is a tech guy (who has already admitted he doesn't know the implications of the various licenses) fumbling around to figure this out.
If they really really don't want to talk to their own legal counsel, then just prepare an instruction list that other municipalities could follow and publish that instead of trying to distribute the whole kit-and-kaboodle.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
perhaps you could even automate handling of FOIA requests for the automation of FOIA request requests, which in turn handles automation of FOIA requests for the automated grant handler...
A SharePoint workflow might be able to handle that.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Microsoft does not make computers, or make them cheaper. That trend was started by hardware manufacturers competing with IBM with clean room implementations of the bios, and continued with netbooks etc. Nice rewrite of history.